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Anyone who rejects this view, and holds that either atoms or
some entities void of part coming together produce soul, is
refuted by the very unity of soul and by the prevailing sympathy
as much as by the very coherence of the constituents. Bodily
materials, in nature repugnant to unification and to sensation,
could never produce unity or self-sensitiveness, and soul is
self-sensitive. And, again, constituents void of part could never
produce body or bulk.
Perhaps we will be asked to consider body as a simple entity
[disregarding the question of any constituent elements]: they
will tell us, then, that no doubt, as purely material, it cannot
have a self-springing life- since matter is without quality- but
that life is introduced by the fact that the Matter is brought to
order under Forming-Idea. But if by this Forming-Idea they mean
an essential, a real being, then it is not the conjoint of body
and idea that constitutes soul: it must be one of the two items
and that one, being [by hypothesis] outside of the Matter, cannot
be body: to make it body would simply force us to repeat our
former analysis.
If on the contrary they do not mean by this Forming-Idea a real
being, but some condition or modification of the Matter, they
must tell us how and whence this modification, with resultant
life, can have found the way into the Matter: for very certainly
Matter does not mould itself to pattern or bring itself to life.
It becomes clear that since neither Matter nor body in any mode
has this power, life must be brought upon the stage by some
directing principle external and transcendent to all that is
corporeal.
In fact, body itself could not exist in any form if soul-power
did not: body passes; dissolution is in its very nature; all
would disappear in a twinkling if all were body. It is no help to
erect some one mode of body into soul; made of the same Matter as
the rest, this soul body would fall under the same fate: of
course it could never really exist: the universe of things would
halt at the material, failing something to bring Matter to shape.
Nay more: Matter itself could not exist: the totality of things
in this sphere is dissolved if it be made to depend upon the
coherence of a body which, though elevated to the nominal rank of
"soul," remains air, fleeting breath [the Stoic pneuma, rarefied
matter, "spirit" in the lower sense], whose very unity is not
drawn from itself.
All bodies are in ceaseless process of dissolution; how can the
kosmos be made over to any one of them without being turned into
a senseless haphazard drift? This pneuma- orderless except under
soul- how can it contain order, reason, intelligence? But: given
soul, all these material things become its collaborators towards
the coherence of the kosmos and of every living being, all the
qualities of all the separate objects converging to the purposes
of the universe: failing soul in the things of the universe, they
could not even exist, much less play their ordered parts.
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